{"id":920,"date":"2022-01-24T14:21:21","date_gmt":"2022-01-24T14:21:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/appsaf.apieproject.com\/news\/?p=920"},"modified":"2022-01-24T14:21:23","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T14:21:23","slug":"was-south-africa-ignored-over-mild-omicron-evidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/appsaf.apieproject.com\/news\/2022\/01\/24\/was-south-africa-ignored-over-mild-omicron-evidence\/","title":{"rendered":"Was South Africa ignored over mild Omicron evidence?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>outh African scientists &#8211; praised internationally for first detecting the Omicron variant &#8211; have accused Western nations of ignoring early evidence that the new Covid variant was &#8220;dramatically&#8221; milder than those which drove previous waves of the pandemic.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Two of South Africa&#8217;s most prominent coronavirus experts told the BBC that Western scepticism about their work could be construed as &#8220;racist,&#8221; or, at least, a refusal &#8220;to believe the science because it came from Africa&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;It seems like high-income countries are much more able to absorb bad news that comes from countries like South Africa,&#8221; said Prof Shabir Madhi, a vaccine expert at Johannesburg&#8217;s University of the Witwatersrand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;When we&#8217;re providing good news, all of a sudden there&#8217;s a whole lot of scepticism. I would call that racism.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Prof Salim Karim, former head of the South African government&#8217;s Covid advisory committee and vice-president of the International Science Council agrees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;We need to learn from each other. Our research is rigorous. Everyone was expecting the worst [about Omicron] and when they weren&#8217;t seeing it, they were questioning whether our observations were sufficiently scientifically rigorous,&#8221; he said, while acknowledging that the sheer number of new mutations in Omicron may have contributed to an abundance of scientific caution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>outh African scientists &#8211; praised internationally for first detecting the Omicron variant &#8211; have accused Western nations of ignoring early evidence that the new Covid variant was &#8220;dramatically&#8221; milder than those which drove previous waves of the pandemic. Two of South Africa&#8217;s most prominent coronavirus experts told the BBC that Western scepticism about their work [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8,16,15],"tags":[47,26,9,25,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-920","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-featured","8":"category-health","9":"category-news","10":"category-politics","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-omicron","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-south-africa"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Was South Africa ignored over mild Omicron evidence? - APIE NEWS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/appsaf.apieproject.com\/news\/2022\/01\/24\/was-south-africa-ignored-over-mild-omicron-evidence\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Was South Africa ignored over mild Omicron evidence? - APIE NEWS\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"outh African scientists &#8211; praised internationally for first detecting the Omicron variant &#8211; have accused Western nations of ignoring early evidence that the new Covid variant was &#8220;dramatically&#8221; milder than those which drove previous waves of the pandemic. 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